If you tried installing Debian testing or any other recent flavor of Linux on Microsoft’s VirtualPC 2007 you probably hit the wall with the “An unrecoverable processor error has been encountered. The virtual machine will reset now.” error during the machine’s first boot after installation.

You may also want to add clocksource=pit as well to solve timing issues and vga=791 for a 1024×768 resolution text mode.

Booting in a usable terminal

To boot in a usable terminal, select the safe (single-user) mode (just select, do not press enter).

Press ‘e’ to edit the command, select the middle line as shown in the picture below then press ‘e’ again. Add the noreplace-paravirt parameter to the end of the line and press enter to go back to the previous screen. Press ‘b’ to boot using the selected kernel entry.

Once you get into a usable terminal, we need to make those changes permanent. We will have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add noreplace-paravirt in the “default kernel options” and the rest in the “additional options” as shown on the two pictures below.

Just open /etc/X11/xorg.conf then look for the “Screen” section. Add the line DefaultDepth 16 as in the picture below, save and reboot (or just restart x).

Conclusion

Ta-daa.

I was hoping to see KDE4 here, but it looks like debian development is just too slow. I mean, it actually was debian unstable. Ubuntu has had KDE4 out-of-the-box for months now, and it is pretty stable. Wtf.

Edit: Debian 5.0 has just been released. Hopefully KDE4 will move from experimental to unstable soon.

This is my aptsources list. If you just need a quick setup for your Debian, copy & paste this text into /etc/apt/sources.list, save the file and then update your package cache with apt-get update. Please note that many of the unofficial repositories listed here exists to serve non-free, non-gpl and/or other commercial stuff.

Now whenever you want to install a package, for example, you need only type the first letters of the package in the apt-get install command line and then hit tab twice to list available packages starting with those letters.

e.g. Typing

apt-get ins<TAB>

will autocomplete to apt-get install. Now continue and type

apt-get install amar<TAB>

and a list with every package with “amar” in their name will be shown. In this example, it will probably list packages such as amaroK and amarok-engines.

I know this feature works with far more commands, however I can’t enumerate all of them because I just don’t know they all. If you think it may work in the context you are in, then it costs nothing to try and check it yourself. Sometimes you’ll be surprised!

Here is a list a few packages I install every time I setup a new Linux box. As this isn’t something I do often (probably only when I’m buying a new computer), I really have to write them down so I don’t forget about them next time. Here is a complete list with the package name and their description. The last update made for this post was made in July 24, 2008.

deborphan – Lists unused and orphaned packages that generally can be removed from your system.

Desktop Tools

katapult – the most useful application launcher I’ve ever seen. Press Alt + Space and a nice, elegant-looking window will pop in the center of your screen. Type anything – a program name, a song name, a google query or even a mathematic formula – it will autocomplete your command and run, play, search or compute for you.

yakuake – want a terminal? Just hit a keyboard shortcut (I have set mine to alt + ~) and a terminal you scroll down your screen just like the Quake console would. Impressive and useful.

ark – graphical user interface for various command line compressing and archiving tools.

opera – The Fastest Browser on Earth! Albeit Opera has been known to be one of the lightest internet browsers available, which in the past could fit inside a single floppy disk, it has built in support for chat, email, torrents, bookmark synchronizing, mouse gestures, voice recognition, thousand of skins and is known to be one of the most secure and standard compliant browsers. Runs everywhere, on computers, cellphones, fridges, televisions and Wiis. For me, it its my browser of choice. Isn’t open source, though.

w3m – So you decided to upgrade X or your nvidia drivers and something went wrong. Now X fails to start and instead you are locked in the dark, text-only world of the linux terminal. Not a problem if you have w3m, a browser for text mode which you can use to call for help searching google. It even supports mouse clicking and the display of pictures through the framebuffer!

Development

build-essential – essential build tools, such as gcc and libc development libraries. A must have if you plan to build Debian packages, including compiling and installing your kernel The Debian Way™.

eagle – the proprietary circuit design tool from CADSoft. Although a powerful software for Windows, its linux counterpart has some issues, mainly with desktop integration. It looks really like a Windows app in your Linux box, not matching any your GTK or KDE themes. Sometimes it want to be run as root (!) to gain some additional privileges. Also it had some problems with X, but I think they were due to compiz.

google-desktop-linux – Google desktop for linux. It doesn’t have that fancy sidebar of the windows version, so it isn’t of much use for me.

googleearth-package – tool for downloading Google Earth and creating a nice .deb package. If it only told you how to do so. After installing, type make-googleearth-package on a console to create the package. Ensure you have proper privileges and install using dpkg -i package_name.deb.

ps: I really feel they should standardize package names for google things. To apt-get picasa and google desktop, you may have to add the Google Linux Software Repository to your apt sources.

Themes & Styles (KDE)

gtk-qt-engine – enables both KDE and GTK based apps to share the same QT theme. A must have for KDE users if your choosen theme isn’t available to GTK. Well, a must have anyways.

lxappearance – a tool for changing GTK styles. Useful for changing the style of applications that have to run with higher privileges, like the Synaptic Package Manager, if you use it together with sudo. i.e: sudo lxappearance

splashy – adds a nice bootsplash to your system without touching your kernel.

wine – The ubiquitous tool for portingemulating running your windows apps on linux. Has reached 1.0 state some months ago, has support for Windows XP themes and works really, really well. Under constant development, though.

winetricks – A script with tricks and hacks to run applications which just wouldn’t work with a vanilla wine installation.

mono – The .Net Framework for Linux. I still don’t know if there is a metapackage for downloading the entire library for a complete replacement of the .Net Framework. I usually install the following packages, as dependencies gets automatically resolved. Packages: mono-gmcs libmono2.0-cil libmono-winforms2.0-cil